Nathan Barr on Writing Music for ‘The Americans’ with Pete Townshend

Working with a music legend can be a daunting task. When that legend is The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, it can be downright intimidating.

For composer Nathan Barr, neither was the case. Barr collaborated with Townshend to write “It Must Be Done,” an original song that will premiere tonight on FX’s “The Americans.”

“The thing I really admired about him is for someone of his stature one wouldn’t be surprised if there was a big ego there, and there is no ego there,” Barr said. “He is just lovely and humble and so easy to work with.”

While this isn’t the first time Townshend’s music has been featured on the show—“Rough Boys” was used in an episode last season—it is the guitarist’s first time writing for television.

“What I was struck by was that Nate composes on the cello, an instrument my partner and orchestrator Rachel (Fuller) uses, so I have listened to a lot of cello music and I have really fallen in love with it,” Townshend said in an interview with with Billboard earlier this month.

The song was an intercontinental effort between the two, with Barr working in Los Angeles and Townshend in England. The haunting tune couples Barr’s cello strings with Townshend’s guitar and lyrics in a tense scene involving Elizabeth Jennings, played by Keri Russell. The song will be available on iTunes after the episode airs.

A two-time Emmy nominee, Barr has worked on films like “Grindhouse” and “Hostel” as well as “True Blood.” Barr spoke with Speakeasy about his collaboration with the music icon, the last season of “True Blood” and his interesting collection of musical instruments.

Edited excerpts:

What was it like working with Pete Townshend?

It was pretty exciting. It was also very surreal because we still haven’t met. It was a collaboration via digital means. I wrote a couple of tracks when I knew Pete was interested that I knew fit the world of the show musically and that might open some interesting ideas for Pete. I sent them off to Pete really having no idea what he was going to do with that. And one track in particular, which ended up being the song, he really loved. He within a week sent back lyrics with him singing and guitar and it became this whole wonderful song that I never could have imagined. It was just a dream.

How did you hear that Pete was working with the show?

Basically the producers had this idea of getting some collaborations going throughout multiple departments of the show, and music was one of them. So our music supervisor, P.J. Bloom, started reaching out to a list of people who we thought might be interested. The only, sort of, prerequisite was that the name of whoever we were going after was big enough that it could mean something for the show in terms of publicity. And Pete knew my music from the show and from movies and he was a fan. So that was an enormously exciting call to get that he was a fan.

How does it feel knowing Pete Townshend is a fan of your music?

Unbelievable! The whole thing was surreal. I was just sitting at home early one morning and the phone rang and I picked up and he said, “Hi, This is Pete Townshend.” It was just like, “What?!” It’s so nice to know that people are listening and the music is resonating with them. And again I’m such a fan of him as a musician. I think we were both trusting of one another’s process in terms of just sending the tracks over and saying, “Whatever you feel, go for it. Let’s just see where this takes us.”

So you sent him the tracks and he wrote the guitar instrumentals and the lyrics to go with the song and you ended up cutting the song together. Is that how that worked?

The track I wrote I knew could work as a piece of score for the show, but had enough of a flow to it that it could possibly work as a song. So basically, he sent back the two-and-a-half minutes that I had sent him with his lyrics and everything. The producers and I kept an eye out for potential sequences in the show which could be really music driven, and we found this one moment in the 10th episode where it was just absolutely perfect. So Pete’s lyrics are wonderfully ironic in terms of the actual scene, so that was a nice surprise.

Have you spoken with him? Is he happy with the end result?

He is very happy. He was pleasantly surprised with the way I had produced the track. You notice the female voice in there—I felt like since the sequence focuses on Elizabeth in part we needed to have some sort of female presence in the song. That’s why I brought in this singer Lisbeth Scott. She sang that recurring vocal part, which I think worked really well.

Besides The Who, who are some of your other musical influences?

God, there’s just so many. I grew up loving, in addition to Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page and guys like that. Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, who I also had the opportunity to work with a couple years ago. Those are all guys that I really admired growing up as a guitarist. And as a cellist, certainly Yo-Yo Ma and [Mstislav] Rostropovich and people like that. And as a composer, I mean there are so many different composers out there right now who are doing interesting things. I would say Alexandre Desplat would definitely be one of them.

You’ve worked on both television and film. Is there one you prefer more?

I just want to work on really wonderful shows with really strong intelligent storytelling, and it doesn’t matter to me these days if it’s in the theater or on TV. I think we all know there’s this amazing renaissance happening on television right now where some of the most daring storytelling is happening on TV. It’s not happening in the movie theaters. That’s been sort of an unexpected transition for me as I’ve done more and more TV. But to actually look at the shows I’m doing, whether it’s “True Blood,” which is really fun but smart. But I do enjoy working in TV because you’ve got 12 to 13 episodes to explore these characters from a musical standpoint.

Speaking of True Blood, you’re working on the last season. Have there been any changes in the way you approach working with the show?

As the show has gotten bigger in scope over the past six seasons, the score has gotten bigger, too. There was a really wonderful intimacy to the storytelling in the first episode. As the show went on, the world just got enormous. An acoustic guitar and a cello were no longer cutting it in these bigger action sequences. I think it’s just growing with the show and being willing to go on that journey wherever it is.

You’ve done a lot of work with horror shows like “True Blood” and “Hemlock Grove” and even “Grindhouse” and “Hostel.” Is there anything in particular that draws you to those types of projects?

Ever since I was a kid I loved horror films. I guess it’s being afraid in a safe space. I think musically you can experiment a lot in ways you can’t with a drama.

You were nominated for two Emmys last year for two different shows.

It was really exciting. I really liked the fact that it was for two completely different types of shows, “The Americans” and “Hemlock Grove.” It was a nice nod that maybe my career wasn’t just about horror films. It was really exciting, just getting the two nominations was the win for me. Amazing.

Do you have any more television projects lined up?

I have next year season three of “The Americans.” There’s a show called “Tumbleaf” I’m doing on Amazon right now which is a kids’ show, which I’m co-composing with Lisbeth Scott. I’m working on a film right now with Universal called “The Boy Next door,” starring Jennifer Lopez, which I’m co-composing with my really good friend Randy Edelman, who’s a wonderful composer. And then season seven of “True Blood.”

That’s a lot. How are you keeping all this together?

It is a lot. Honestly, I don’t know. It’s very little downtime. This year I’ve reached my breaking point. I’ve discovered the most I can take on and be a sane human being.

In reading your bio, it says you have an interest in different kinds of instruments. Do any of your exotic instruments come into play when you’re composing for a show?

Absolutely, especially on a show like “True Blood,” which had so many strange, supernatural characters, it really allowed for exploration with various instruments like the human bone trumpet that I have. Or a glass harmonica or some of these weird cello instruments that I have. The one I’m really excited to add to my collection and start using is Wurlitzer theater organ, which was the organ used at 20th Century Fox studios on movies like “The Sound of Music” and “Patton” and “Star Trek.” It has this enormously rich history in film music going back to the ‘20s. And so I just purchased that and look forward to really having fun with incorporating that into scores.

Now when you say theater organ, I’m thinking of when I go to a theater and they have the guy sitting in the corner with the giant organ.

That’s it!

So where do you keep something like that?

I’m building a studio here on my property, and I’m kind of insanely building the studio around the organ. It’s like 1,600 pipes. It’s really big. But it’s just a really unique instrument and sound to have access to and is not something you hear that often. I have sort of high hopes for that. It’s also historically just a really important instrument, like Bernard Herrmann used it and John Williams and all these great people over the years.

And the human bone trumpet, can you explain that one?

When monks pass away, some of them, they have their bones made into ornamental, ceremonial instruments. They have like skull cap percussion instruments. They’ll take the femur and wrap it in silver and put precious stones on it and bore it out so it can be played like a trumpet. It’s more of interest from an aesthetic point of view. It’s just absolutely beautiful. But it does create some unbelievably weird sounds, too.

That’s fascinating.

Yeah, it’s odd!

It’s a little odd. It’s more interesting than odd, I think.

If I have a date up here and then I show that to them, I hear the wheels screeching in the driveway and then they’re gone!